


His Greatest Adversary Yet

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work
Genre: Comic Book Science, Cosmic Wonder, M/M, Presumed Dead, Sexuality Crisis, Superheroes, Supervillains, The Smallest Indivisible Unit of Identity Porn, Villain Protagonist, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:35:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29080227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Doctor Nowhere doesn't do the nemesis thing. But the Blue Beacon hasn't been seen in a while, and the more he learns about why, the more it haunts him.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character, Retired Male Superhero/Male Supervillain Who Keeps Seeking Him Out Because He Misses Him
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9
Collections: Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2020





	His Greatest Adversary Yet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Starrie_Wolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starrie_Wolf/gifts).



There wasn't much art to interrogating robots. The Wardens' mustachioed butler automaton was sophisticated enough to offer a little bit of repartee, but it didn't have anything Max would call _psychology_. Especially not after Max slipped a hand through its titanium alloy chest and pulled out its drive array. 

The rest of the robot collapsed in an art deco heap. Max sank into one of the couches in the Wardens' fiftieth-floor rec room and wired the drives up to his laptop. Every Wardens HQ had a butler like this one, Babbage 001 through 018, and with any luck, they all used similar encryption protocols.... 

Bingo. Babbage's disembodied brain gave up everything. 

Artificial intelligences complex enough to pun tended to organize data idiosyncratically. He opened one file with a promising name to find it full of indecipherable nonsense characters; another, and it was full of cocktail recipes. The location of the Wardens' secret research facility had to be in here, but he'd never find it like this. Better to upload everything to a server back at his base and comb through it later. 

A tremor in the floor rattled the abandoned drinks on the coffee table and sent a magazine flopping onto the carpet. That might've been the fight downtown making itself felt, but more likely the source was right below Max's feet. He wasn't the only one to have had the thought of hitting the Wardens HQ while they were all out on "business", just the fastest. And Max, unlike these latecomers, hadn't had to blast his way in. Another shiver ran through the building, closer now. For people who evidently could not fly, reaching the top of the Wardens HQ meant passing dozens of storeys of meeting rooms, server rooms, and exotic gymnasiums designed to challenge some of the most powerful superhumans in the world -- and apparently blowing every door they encountered on the way. 

They were halfway up, Max thought. Plenty of time for his upload to finish. He drew one of his pistols anyway, just in case. 

Then he opened another file. He surely wasn't going to unravel the secrets of Babbage's many-terabyte mind on the spot -- _but_ , if the files with promising names were no use, what about the ones named strings of apparently random numbers, or _dogs.txt_? 

_dogs.txt_ was a list of superpowered dogs. Okay, Max had walked into that one. 

The next file was a log of Warden comings and goings, which was more like it. Then more indecipherable characters. Then a list of addresses and birthday gift ideas for retired Wardens. 

He was about to close that last file when his eye caught on a familiar name: Fusion. Fusion had died three years ago, in the fight that broke out when an alien ship appeared over the Pacific Ocean and began to steal it. By rights he should not have been on this list -- but his birthday gift idea was _N/A_ and the address was the address of the same cemetery where Max's aunt Mathilda was buried. Babbage had updated the address to reflect the location of his remains, which made a certain ghastly mechanical sense. 

Max wasn't running this errand to snoop on dead Wardens, but, well, plans changed. He scrolled a little more, then hit Control+F and searched for _Blue Beacon_ \-- and then, catching himself, just _Beacon_. 

And there it was. _N/A_ , and an address Max didn't recognize, in the pleasant hills past the suburbs. The Beacon was dead after all. 

An emotion Max couldn't articulate caught in his throat. 

There'd been no death announcement. The public hadn't mourned -- Max might now be the only member of the public who even _knew_. So this was a coverup, which meant the Beacon had died doing something extremely embarrassing, either personally or politically. Sexual indiscretion? Some treaty-violating black op? It had been six months now, and even reputable news outlets were starting to wonder about whether the Beacon was alive. One of the most famous men in the world had died in some way that would be worse PR than simply letting the speculation continue unchecked. 

Max didn't do the nemesis thing. Yes, the Beacon was the only person who'd ever beaten Max, but there were no hard feelings. He had trapped Max fair and square, with a genuinely clever gambit that Max had added a whole air filtration system to his mask to account for, and Max had walked away from it with nothing worse than a knockout-gas headache thanks to one of the other Wardens mishandling him in transport. No harm, no foul. It had just struck Max as odd that the Beacon had completely vanished from the public eye after that. 

The birthday gift list didn't provide any insight as to the why or how of the Beacon's death, but there must have been enough of him to bury. Good for him. Maybe Max would bring flowers. 

A snarl echoed up the emergency stairs and through the door, a voice that was barely human: someone complaining about the long haul to the top of the HQ with the elevators out. Their compatriot -- or one of them; Max thought there might be three total -- replied in a measured drawl. 

Shit. Max had woolgathered straight through the end of his upload, and his fellow interlopers were one floor away, maybe less. 

He slapped his laptop closed, holstered his gun, and ran back to Babbage's "unconscious" body with the drive array in hand. All right, now he was being foolish. His hoverboard awaited him right outside the window; he could get away clean, right now. Applying hilarious but entirely unnecessary gracenotes was how people like Max, but stupider than Max, got caught. 

Max slipped the drive array right back through Babbage's chestplate with his immaterial hands. He was fairly sure it was seated a little wrong, slightly interpenetrating the screws that held it in place. Someone else would have to fix that. Max jammed the cables back into place and touched his finger directly to the power contacts on Babbage's main logic board -- _ow_. 

Light returned to Babbage's eyes. The whole building booted back up along with it: the overhead lights brightened, the elevators wheezed back to life. A faint glitter of lasers issued from the camera domes on the ceiling. A klaxon sounded. Panels on the walls began to slide open. 

"What the hell?" one of the other interlopers said, faintly, through the door, just before it blew. Max shielded his head with his hands, one of those animal reflexes he'd yet to lose even though he knew, _he knew_ , that the debris would pass harmlessly through him. 

At the last moment, he remembered to leave a calling card, tucked inside Babbage's body. Then he snatched his laptop up off the couch and leapt unobstructed through the window glass, onto his waiting hoverboard. He doubted the card would be found tonight -- some Wardens technician would uncover it in a few weeks or months, probably while they tried to figure out what the hell had happened to Babbage's drive chassis. 

_Thank you for your gracious hospitality._

_\-- Doctor Nowhere_

\- 

What Max wanted to do, back at his base, was jump right back into Babbage's files and keep searching. There was a lead in there, he knew it. The Wardens were running a human enhancement program in secret, and Max was so close to tracking it down he could almost taste it. 

But trawling through a database this size would be the work of months for one still-approximately-human man. He set an artificial intelligence of his own loose on it instead. Nothing as sophisticated as Babbage, just a neural network trained to sniff out anything that might point to a lab site, a project lead Max could put the screws to, even a recording of incautious shoptalk conducted in the Wardens HQ. It would take a few days, but the AI didn't have to eat or sleep. It didn't have appointments tomorrow, or clothing waiting for it at the dry cleaner. 

It still needed an hour or two of babying if he didn't want to come back to a heap of nonsense. Max put on the late-night news and listened for references to himself while he worked. His crimes often took weeks to even be noticed, but in this case he'd been spotted, so.... 

Nope. Nothing about the Wardens HQ even came up. The fight downtown had been so big and ugly no one had noticed a few extra explosions. 

At bat tonight was one of the new recruits, a blandly handsome young man with the powers of telekinesis and making everything he said sound like he was reading it off a teleprompter. He did not go by Captain Breadstick, but damned if Max could remember his actual codename when the news chyron wasn't displaying it. 

Captain Breadstick was indirectly responsible for tonight's break-in -- him and two other rookie Wardens, almost certainly not named Captains Cantaloupe and Meatloaf. They had similar military haircuts, similar military backgrounds, similar abilities. Square-jawed heroes right off the assembly line. That never happened; deliberately induced superhuman abilities were unpredictable and, in most cases, unstable. Obviously, the Wardens or the Department of Extranormal Affairs or some combination of the above had experienced a breakthrough. And, obviously, Max needed to steal it. 

He'd practically be doing them a favor. Well, no; Max tinkering with his own abilities really helped no one other than Max. But surely stopping the Wardens from completely packing their ranks with interchangeable young bores was a public good. 

It made sense that they'd be doing this now, with the Beacon dead. There was no one like him in their current lineup. The news had moved on to the speculation-about-the-Beacon's-absence portion that concluded virtually every story about the Wardens these days, and they were running that famous clip of him during the tsunami, almost twenty-five years ago. He'd been the _Blue_ Beacon in those hokier days, a change Max had never fully caught up with. The Blue Beacon was a South Asian man, frightfully young at the time and not even particularly tall, with his feet planted amidst the sea-wrack and puzzled crabs of a swath of exposed ocean floor. He was soaked head to foot, clutching empty air with his upraised hands so hard that they shook, and he was holding back the full force of the tsunami with a thousand-foot wall of blue-white light. A fold down the center, sharp as an origami crease, split the wave like the prow of a boat; the rage of the waters was faintly visible through the spectral barrier. 

It was one thing to be good in a fight and another for one man to simply say _No_ to an act of God that should have leveled a city. Maybe there was no one else like him at all. 

Max's hands had gone still on the keyboard. He shook himself. His AI had flagged three files -- nothing that looked actionable, but it was on the right track. Perfect. He made himself close them and shut off his mainframe's monitors. 

He dossed down in his base of operations, rocked to sleep in his hammock by the subway line that ground past overhead every hour, and was up in time to pick up his dry cleaning and still hit the bank before noon. Which was to say, to walk into the vault of the First Union on Bellaire street with an empty briefcase, and back out with a full one. He tucked a card into one of the stacks of twenties that he didn't take: _Thank you for your gracious hospitality_. 

What felt weird about stopping in at the bank was not stealing half a million dollars -- that was normal for him now -- but that he was the only person in the building who knew for a fact that the Beacon was dead. The knowledge dogged him through sandwich shops and traffic jams, his dentist's waiting room, the art gallery he went to for money laundering. A round of Words With Friends a couple of evenings later handed him all the letters to spell _beacon_ , tauntingly. He went with the lower-scoring _canoe_ , as though Valerie, having failed to notice that Max had become a notorious criminal following their divorce, might now look at her phone on the other side of the country and intuit his least important secret from a game of electronic Scrabble. 

"Oh, come on," he said under his breath when, glancing at one of the TVs in a bar, he found it silently running the tsunami clip. The Beacon was only the most famous man on Earth; surely he hadn't been _this_ ubiquitous last week. 

"You know, he's like half the reason I came out to you," said Alison, following his gaze. She had taken his chemistry class some fifteen years ago; now she was, with the assistance of Max and her girlfriend, drinking away the jitters after her dissertation defense. "He'd just done that big interview where he was like, _I'm bi, I'm dating a man, I have been secretly dating various men the entire time the Wardens have existed_ , and he just looked so fucking scared the whole time. I was like, _Oh, I guess it's okay to be scared?_ " 

"Oh, honey," her girlfriend said, and hugged her. 

"What was the other half?" said Max. 

"Oh, I completely thought you were gay for the first three years of high school," Alison said. Her girlfriend, arms still slung about her, cracked up. "I didn't realize I was wrong until I was literally in the middle of coming out to you, and you were like -- don't get me wrong," she said to her girlfriend, "he was really nice about it, but like, _That's great, kiddo! I have no idea what this has to do with me!_ " Alison made finger guns at Max. "Just could not have given less of a shit. It was great, actually. In my head it was the biggest thing in the world, and the idea of someone just not really caring had not crossed my mind." 

"If I had been thinking on my feet, I would have used it to blackmail you into treating the fucking Bunsen burners with a modicum of respect," Max said, launching Alison into an exploration of all the ways she had nearly immolated or poisoned herself in his classroom. Her girlfriend -- a charming young woman who clearly adored Alison and probably, when Max really thought about it, had a name of some sort -- convulsed with laughter. 

"Anyway, I really hope he's just doing something very secret in space," Alison said eventually, looking past Max again at the television. 

Could it _still_ be playing Beacon footage? Max wasn't even going to look. "Was it the bowties?" 

"The--?" Alison reached up automatically to touch her own tie, a conventional necktie in an elaborate knot. 

"That made you think I was gay. It's been happening more since I retired. I'm hatching a theory that a chemistry teacher in a bowtie doesn't require an explanation, but a man in line at the grocery store does." 

"Oh, man, don't look at me. I was seventeen and I definitely once tried to ask out Sandra Morelli, so I probably just had shit gaydar." Alison patted Max's arm and polished off her sixth-or-so cocktail. "I think of you every time I wear a bowtie, which is pretty often, so you're still a gay style icon in my heart." 

"That's almost certainly very kind of you," Max said, to another round of laughter. 

He covered the tab, leaving a stack of unmarked, non-sequential twenties on the bar, and bundled Alison and her girlfriend into a cab. Max would need one himself, but first he walked for a while along this stretch of shops and bars and community theaters in the pleasant springtime dusk, listening to the city begin to rev up for the night. 

Two humanoid silhouettes flitted past overhead, silently there and then gone. Max's own annoyance surprised him. He had no reason to believe they were Wardens, and he had no real onus against the Wardens when they weren't interfering with his business or keeping information that he wanted from him. _Inflicting_ information that he _didn't_ want on him worked out to the same level of irritation, apparently. 

Max could blow the story. If the problem was being in on a secret he had no desire to keep, maybe the solution was just not keeping it. Make it the problem of Captains Breadstick et al., and that even more boring Department of Extranormal Affairs suit who sometimes did spin for the Wardens. Pemberton, or something. No, on second thought, he'd need much better evidence of the Beacon's death than a line on a robot's birthday gift list. That would be a whole project unto itself. 

What he should actually do was let it go. Not overcomplicating things had gotten him this far in the tumultuous world of superhuman crime. There was no reason to change now. 

If anything, he should be relieved! Celebratory! Max probably wouldn't even need the gun he'd invented just for killing the Beacon! 

He stopped to look at it when he returned to his base of operations the next day: a curvy, flanged number, out of place amidst Max's mostly off-the-shelf arsenal. The phase eduction pistol was a solution to a problem Max hadn't realized existed until he'd mistakenly gotten into a stand-up fight with the Beacon -- namely, that a bullet leaving the immaterial gun in his immaterial hand at once became solid. This was the desired behavior, right up until he was trying to either kill or escape from a man who could interpose forcefields between himself and Max, and between Max and safety. Max couldn't shoot through them, and he couldn't pass through them quite as easily as he did conventional matter. The Beacon had trapped him in a welter of bubbles, platonic solids, lattices -- a luminous maze that demolished his sense of direction, until he stumbled right into a chamber where a knockout-gas mine waited for him. 

It had been disorienting. It had been, if he was perfectly honest with himself, terrifying. He'd still escaped, but only thanks to a different Warden's fuckup. Sheer might was not the only reason the Beacon had been the lynchpin of the Wardens roster for the entirety of his three-decade career. 

So Max was going to shoot him, if they saw each other again. 

Or so the theory went. The educer worked -- it wasn't exactly pleasant to fire, but it would keep a bullet immaterial until it reached Max's target. He had yet to even take it into the field. Because the Beacon had shown neither hide nor hair of himself since their last encounter. Because he was dead. Damn it, Max might as well throw the gun away. 

He caught himself. No, that was ridiculous. It wasn't like a sweater he had been knitting just for the Beacon. It could fire through walls or armor just as easily as forcefields. He'd find a use for it. 

Moreover, he was too busy to be worrying about this. His artificial intelligence had been chewing through Babbage's memories for almost a week now. He had things to do. Max closed the weapons cabinet and put the Beacon out of his mind. 

\- 

Barring a log of someone leaning toward one of Babbage's ear microphones and declaring, "And in case Doctor Nowhere is listening in, here are the formulae," the best case scenario would have been the Wardens talking freely amongst themselves about the secret human enhancement program they were using to bulk up their ranks. Max only hoped for this a little when he began digging into his AI's output, and was only a little disappointed when it wasn't the case. 

Even with some of the heavy lifting done for him, he had hundreds of files to sort and examine. He threw a virtual whiteboard up on the big monitor and started grouping images and conversation logs, then drawing connections. 

It quickly emerged that four of the Wardens alluded often to "the farm". One of these was Hourglass, who famously had grown up on a literal farm; the other three names turned out to correspond to Captains Breadsick, Cantaloupe and Meatloaf when Max looked them up. Cantaloupe and Meatloaf talked to each other about "the farm" -- also, they were either sleeping with each other or very, very enthusiastic about working out -- and all three of them talked about "the farm" with someone named Peterson who Max also had to look up. Oh, the DEXA representative who sometimes delivered press releases for the Wardens wasn't named Pemberton after all. 

Max couldn't fucking _wait_ to forget all of these people's names and faces when he was finished with this. 

He pursued this "farm" through arguments, through asides, through a three AM conversation in the Wardens HQ kitchen. It was the rare exchange conducted _with_ Babbage instead of merely in its vicinity: Captain Breadstick, woken by a nightmare, had vented about it to Babbage over milk and cookies. 

Breadstick's description of running down a hallway in his dream, of opening a door onto grass and water, was cross-referenced with a map. 

Max caught his breath. It looked like a research campus or a summer camp, not a farm: a scattering of buildings tucked into the curve of a lake on one side, hemmed in by trees on the other. The buildings were numbered, but there was no legend. 

And that was it. None of Babbage's other memories referenced this map, and when Max looked at its timestamp, he found it was years, decades, older than anything else Babbage remembered. Captain Breadstick's nightmare had unearthed a trace of something expunged. 

Max trawled back through the database, but that really was _it_. The map was a dead end at best, a red herring at worst. The only way to tell which it was might be to compare this photo to satellite imagery of every lake in the United States, which would take unthinkable amounts of time and maybe yield nothing at all. Buildings could be knocked down, bodies of water could change their banks. He might as well have made no progress. 

That wasn't quite true. He'd learned some things, and one of them was that what-was-his-name, Pemberton, was intimately and perhaps centrally involved in this business, which meant it was a DEXA project. Max could break into their headquarters, poke through _their_ files -- they were a harder target than Babbage, but he could do it. Or, much more straightforward, he could capture and question Pemberton. 

That _would_ work, but ... ugh. Yes, Max had stolen many millions of dollars. Yes, he had shot a few people. Yes, one of the experiments he'd conducted while he was designing the phase eduction gun had turned a passing subway train briefly immaterial, and extricating it from the stretch of underground infrastructure it fused with when it became solid again had apparently been something of a hassle for the city government. But none of that was _personal_. Max, _Doctor Nowhere_ , wasn't some petty asshole. He wasn't in this game for his ego, or to avenge some imagined slight, or because he got off on hurting bystanders. 

Max was a scientist. He was an _explorer_. He didn't _kidnap_ people. 

He spent a couple of hours lolling angrily in his desk chair, making irresponsible decisions about the contents of his freezer -- the food one -- and watching those stupid who-would-win-in-a-fight "documentaries" the Discovery Channel ran in the middle of the night. At least they were about animals for a change, not Max's superpowered colleagues. 

He must have dozed off; he came back around to find that his trashy edutainment had been replaced with -- he wasn't immediately sure, but the Beacon was on his television. Max sat bolt upright, briefly awash with adrenaline, as though the Beacon had actually shown up in his hideout. But no, this was just some human interest interview from probably ten years ago. 

"You again," Max groaned. People loved pointing cameras at the Beacon's face so much, it was a wonder he ever had time to save the world. 

"Everyone who survived the blast was offered regular checkups, hot cocoa, and a weekly group sit-down to discuss what we were going through," the Beacon was saying. A great deal of London lingered in his voice, though at the time of recording he would have been a United States citizen for most of his life. He lounged on a couch in uniform, gesticulating with a mug: cozy, without relinquishing a scrap of authority. 

Max fumbled his glasses off his face and knuckled at his eyes. He felt every second he'd spent in this chair, in the underground chill of his base. 

"The friendships that formed in those sessions are among the strongest I've had," the Beacon went on. "You know some of them too, of course: Ironclad, Neptune. Most of the others are leading private lives now, but we stay in touch. And comparing notes helped us realize how many of us, the young ones especially, had developed extranormal abilities with a stable expression that was safe for us and safe for the people around us." There was a shaky clip here of the Beacon at maybe fifteen, all lit up with a grin, presenting the cameraperson with a blue-white cube that rotated in thin air between the palms of his hands. "Inevitably, we wanted to explore what we could do, and then we began to think about what we could _accomplish_. The Wardens weren't a glimmer in anyone's eye, back then. The idea of the superhero was really invented in those group sessions." 

Max's desk was a mess. His apartment was probably also a mess, but he hadn't been there in days. He should go home. Sleep in a real bed, be a civilian for a while. Recharge. _Kidnap and question a government agent_ was the kind of bad idea that happened when he was pushing himself too hard. 

What he should not be doing was sitting here listening to this. _No one_ should listen to this; it was half-truths where it wasn't outright lies. 

By rights, it should have been boring. 

"I was not the only one the blast had orphaned." The Beacon had the kind of face that made his unadorned delivery of this seem soulful. It was something about his eyelids. He lowered his gaze for a moment, the very smallest abstraction of a head bowed in mourning, then transfixed the camera with his attention again. It took under a second. "A group home was established for us that also became a school for the others to visit on weekends. A great deal of trial and error was involved, as you can imagine. No one in history had trained the kind of athlete we were trying to become." 

The Beacon seemed like roughly the last person DEXA would have selected for their Wardens front man if they'd had options, and the corn-fed heartland types they'd lined up as successors only reinforced Max's impression. But all of them lacked the Beacon's secret genius, which was a no-nonsense warmth that made him utterly convincing, even when he was delivering outright propaganda about the largesse of the US government and how he was fine with being orphaned in a mysterious explosion that granted superpowers to half the survivors, because at least then he'd had the privilege of being stolen straight out of foster care and shaped into a weapon. 

Max had been clearing the detritus from his desk into a wastebasket, and found that his hands had slowed to a halt. He coughed, tied off the bag, and immediately dropped it on his foot when the camera cut away from the Beacon again, to-- 

It said Camp Echo Lake at the bottom of the screen, and Max knew it at once. He'd looked at the map of it enough. There was the curve of the lakeshore on one side, the trees on the other. This shot had been taken from a helicopter; the forest thrashed in its downdraft. 

They'd turned the place where the Beacon grew up into a manufacturing plant for his replacements. 

\- 

Max turned off the TV. Powered down his mainframe. Threw away the bag of desk detritus. Went the fuck home. 

His place _was_ a mess, and everything in the refrigerator had gone off. Coming home was always a bit of a letdown after the desolate grandeur of the abandoned subway station where he laired, but what it lacked in barrel vaults and glass tile, it made up for with a comfortable bed and the pleasant background susurrus of people going about their lives. Max found something in the freezer that at least made him feel better about himself than the fast food he'd been picking up at nearby operational subway stations did, and sorted through his mail while he ate. He stretched systematically until his whole body came unkinked, then took a blisteringly hot shower. His bed called to him, but it was a nice clear night; he went up to the roof first. 

He'd put a patio chair up there a while back. For a man with a hoverboard, any flat surface was an observation deck. Max propped his feet up on some blocky HVAC object and gazed up into the Deep. 

The universe was so much more full than it looked to a conventional telescope. Even the scant light-years between Max and the nearest stars undulated with oceans of strange matter, with the bow-waves of enormous creatures, with what Max guessed to be the remnants of a transit system constructed by a civilization of unspeakable age. And out beyond those near stars -- the structures must have been of staggering size for Max to see them at all. The colors alone made mockery of his vocabulary. There were shapes in the night sky that his brain rendered into involuntary hand movements or inarticulable longings. He could only guess what he was missing, limited by his mostly-merely-human instruments of perception. 

He'd spent his whole life guessing. Conventional science had discovered in the Sixties that the farther you traveled perpendicularly away from spacetime, the solid world of three-dimensions-plus-time where humans lived, the weirder and more complex things got. Max would have been ten or fifteen at the time, but he had been privy to this view since he was born. Time had only improved his vision. He saw more each year, not farther in three-dimensional space but farther into the reaches of the Deep -- though Deeper entities and concepts rarely ventured down into Earth's gravity well, so the two kinds of distance weren't unrelated. Max could walk down a city street without encountering anything much more unusual than a human. It was when he looked up that the universe unfurled itself for him. 

Max would have to rise to meet it. 

He'd begun experimenting on himself, oh, maybe twenty years ago. Just to see. Incredibly stupid and dangerous, but it had _worked_. He became immaterial by bumping his molecules far enough into the Deep to stop them from interacting with normal matter. At the time, he'd had no further ambition: just to see, just to explore. 

That was before he retired, a little young thanks to his wife's comfortable pension; before he and Valerie had realized that ten hours of each other per week had been just the right amount, actually, and split up; before he'd realized how tight things could get on a single pension. Before he'd gotten desperate enough to rob his first bank. 

Another new dimension had opened up for him then. He'd loved teaching, and being a husband; he'd never felt unfulfilled in that life. He'd never had a reason to learn that violence and theft didn't trouble his conscience. So he had also never imagined how fucking _good_ he would be at stealing things, and at trading favors with the puppy-kicking megalomaniacs who predominated in his new community. Max had pursued what he thought was his sole calling for some four decades, only to discover an entire second one when he had -- what, maybe twenty good years in which to explore it, at the outside? He was holding up superhumanly well, literally, for sixty-seven, but there was bound to be a limit. One that Max was pretty sure he could circumvent by becoming a completely unphysical being of the far Deep. 

That might still end his career as a bank robber, but becoming a space god would make up for it. 

Those were the stakes. Max would get infinity or he would get nothing. He couldn't just huff exotic matter willy-nilly the way he'd done when he was forty and an idiot; he was playing for keeps now. Whatever stable, predictable exposure process DEXA was running on its recruits might not do anything for Max directly, but he needed to understand how it worked. 

Which meant breaking into the childhood home of the man he'd spent over a week trying to forget. 

Max missed the halcyon era of Tuesday before last, when things with the Beacon weren't complicated. Breaking into a secret government training camp to steal research was business as usual; breaking into the Beacon's childhood foster home shortly after learning of his death felt like sneaking into Graceland. Not that he'd been particularly caught up in the Beacon's celebrity, but the man had been a media fixture for close to half of Max's life, far longer than he'd been a potential adversary of Doctor Nowhere and _far_ longer than Max had entertained the notion of having to kill him. Most of the thoughts Max had had about the Beacon over the course of his life had been as Maxwell Missing, chemistry teacher. 

Most of those thoughts had been positive, Max supposed. The Beacon had certainly saved Max's life -- he had saved the lives of some comically large percentage of all living humans, including everyone who wasn't in space or the deep ocean on March 12, 2016. It wasn't personal, but it had been pleasant to know that he was out there handling things, like a first-responder for when you needed to evacuate a major city in hours or rebuff an asteroid. 

And now Max was completely alone with the knowledge of the Beacon's death. For pity's sake, no wonder he was tying himself in all these knots about it. 

He needed to put this to bed. The news would come out eventually, and the mourning would be public and immense when it did, but maybe Max should do something small, just for his own peace of mind. His very first thought, back in Wardens HQ, had been putting flowers on the grave. Maybe that was actually a good idea. 

Oh, and if he wanted to be able to gloat to Hexbeast and the Mercury Man about being the first to know, he'd need to make some sort of convincing time capsule. Hexbeast wouldn't mislay a thing like that if he gave it to her, and _probably_ wouldn't just snap it in half and look inside. 

Just having a plan cleared Max's head like nothing else had. He was incredibly tired, the good clean sleep-like-a-baby tired of a long day's work. 

"Thanks," he said to the brilliant sky. For weeks something had been passing by outside Neptune's orbit, leaving a gargantuan wake; it threw great gauzy curls of luminous matter half the size of the solar system, but the being or vehicle or particle or concept itself was too Deep for Max to see. Yet. Maybe soon. He aimed a salute its way. "I always appreciate these talks." 

\- 

The late-morning sun beckoned Max out of town the next day. Around his car, the city turned to suburbs, to hills, to tall quiet forest; the road narrowed and serpentined. Max hummed along with the radio and backtalked his GPS. He felt so much better this morning that he'd almost decided last night's head-straightening session had been sufficient on its own, but best not to interrupt a process that seemed to be working. Before he'd left civilization, he had stopped for a bouquet of white lilies and, why the hell not, improbably blue forget-me-nots. 

Almost there. This place was remoter than Max had imagined when he'd stolen the address from Babbage's head, but that made good sense. There were any number of compelling reasons not to bury superhumans too near major metropolitan areas. Long dirt or gravel driveways forked off the road at intervals, each with a mailbox. There must have been some little graveyard out here for the locals. 

Max turned down a driveway with its wheel ruts almost fully retaken by grass, hemmed in tightly by trees. The building at the end was roughly what he had pictured, a little pointy thing, but there was no graveyard around it. 

"You have arrived at your destination!" his GPS chirped. 

Babbage's birthday gift file was on Max's phone, just in case of exactly this sort of situation. He double-checked, but there was no mistake; this was the place. 

Baffled, Max got out of the car. Some reflex made him grab the bouquet off the passenger seat, but he could see already that no one was buried here, that the building that stood in the clearing wasn't even a chapel. It was an A-frame cabin, hardwood and glass, with cedar siding so new it was still red. Circling around the back revealed a deck with a cord of firewood stacked beneath it, a vegetable garden, and a shed that shared its oversized foundation with a squat white brick box Max identified, on approaching it, as a pottery kiln. A brook babbled somewhere off in the woods. Not a headstone or mausoleum in sight. 

This was just someone's fucking _house_. Had the whole damn thing been a snipe hunt? 

Behind Max, the back door opened. He whirled. 

The Blue Beacon stood on the deck, wiping his hands on a dish towel. "Something I can help you with?" he said. 

\- 

The Beacon was a man with a uniform for all seasons. Field uniforms, formal uniforms, "photo op having wholesome fun at the beach with the rest of the Wardens to make the living superweapon seem relatable and human" Wardens-issue trunks. Max had never seen a photo of him in clothes that looked like he had chosen them to reflect his taste. 

He was wearing jeans. Jeans and an Oxford shirt with a streak of flour on the chest. He'd grown his hair out past regulation length, past his ears. It was curly, and shot through with white like a thundercloud. He had a few days' worth of salt-and-pepper stubble, something Max had also never seen on him. 

A thought shattered the staticky television screen of Max's mind: 

_I've never seen such a handsome man in my life_. 

That didn't make any sense. Never mind handsomer men, which Max did not consider himself an authority on -- Max had seen _this_ specific man before. During their last encounter he had tried to shoot the Beacon from far closer than this, and at the time had thought he looked a bit like an overworked accountant in a flight suit. 

"Sir?" said the Beacon. A touch of the customary _Greetings, Citizen_ crept back into his voice. He slung the towel over his shoulder and came to the railing of the deck. 

Max was just standing there inert, like an electronic device fried by a lightning strike. He shook himself, and was pleasantly surprised to find that his mouth was not hanging open. 

"I'm sorry," Max stammered, "I wasn't even expecting there to be a _house_ here." He'd need a good lie soon, but until he devised one, portions of the truth would make him sound like a harmless idiot. 

And he legitimately was one of those two things. Max had gotten this whole business so fucking wrong, and if he stopped to examine the chain of mistakes now he'd end up in prison. 

"Do you bring a lot of bouquets to undeveloped woodland glades, then?" the Beacon said. 

Fuck, the flowers. Max looked at them foolishly for a moment -- and then he had it. Thank fuck for the flowers. "I had a pet, a dog, when I was a kid, who loved the woods out here, so I buried it here when it died. I stop in once in a while." 

"And your dog's interests tended more to flower arrangements than, say, bones?" 

"Well, he's dead. The ritual's really for me." 

Max had not expected to get a laugh out of the Beacon, and it looked like the Beacon hadn't expected that either. Max took a half-step forward without thinking. He'd have to walk right past the Beacon to get back to the car, if he didn't want to give him an ostentatiously wide berth. 

"All right," the Beacon said, leaning on the rail. "So I built my house on the grave of your childhood pet." 

"This all happened fifty years ago," Max said. "I can't guarantee I'm in the right neck of the woods, never mind pointing out the right patch of ground." He took another step, and another, angling back around the flank of the house. "Anyway, he's obviously in capable hands. Sorry to disturb you, I'll get out of your hair." 

The hair in question had bounced out of the Beacon's face when he laughed, but now that he'd sobered, the breeze was rearranging it over his eye. Tiny details of his appearance seemed obsessively interesting. Was this what hapless camerapersons felt when they ended up filming yet another Beacon piece? Max might get it now. On TV, the Beacon was more than magnetic enough to pull off his schtick; here in person, Max didn't think he'd looked away once since the Beacon had come out of the house. 

He was looking back at Max, much too thoughtfully. He seemed inches away from drawing a conclusion that Max would not like, and Max _had not brought the phase eduction gun_. Max had spent months devising a gun just to kill this man with and then shown up almost literally on his doorstep, at the house where he _lived_ because he was fucking _alive_ , armed with nothing but a handful of flowers and whatever passed for Max's wits these days, only to be paralyzed by his personal charisma. Max was going to prison and they were going to put him in a special isolation cell for four-dimensional men who were in danger of, and indeed _had richly earned_ , being mocked to death by the rest of the-- 

"What's your feeling about souffle?" the Beacon said. 

Max was about as prepared for this question as he was for every other thing that was happening at the moment. 

"About -- what?" 

From the infinite set of all possible human utterances, the Blue fucking Beacon for some reason chose to say, "Imagine the average of an angel food cake and a lava cake, which in this case is also an omelet." 

"No, I know what a _souffle_ is," Max said, more sharply than he'd intended. His brain was going to leak out of his ears. "Why are we talking about it?" 

"I've got a test batch coming out of the oven in a few minutes." The Beacon stepped back from the rail and opened the door of his house again. Under the deep eaves of the A-frame roof, the back wall of the house was mostly glass; its top half looked into a bedroom, its bottom half into a tidy kitchen with wood countertops. "Probably shouldn't eat them all myself. Make yourself comfortable." 

Max hadn't said yes to anything, but between one sentence and the next, the Beacon had ceased operating on the possibility that the answer might be no -- and maybe he was right to, because Max's foot was on the first step up to the deck. This was such a terrible idea, an absolutely monumentally shitty borderline-suicidal idea, but Max couldn't stop his feet and wasn't sure he wanted to. The number of ways to find out what was actually going on seemed limited, and this might be paradoxically much safer than a blunt approach like data theft or surveillance. Where had the Beacon _been_? 

"Oh," he said, as Max came up to him in the doorway, "I'm Joseph Nayar." He stuck his hand out. 

It seemed wrong to think of his handshake as _gentle_ when he had fucking gassed Max a few months ago, but the Beacon had the grip of a man who had forearms like bridge cables -- Max could see them; his sleeves were cuffed up past the elbow -- but not a damn thing to prove to anyone about how strong he was. He handled Max's hand like it was the hand of ... oh right, fuck, the hand of a skinny old man who might have who-knew-what going on with his joints. 

And he was waiting for a name. Well, Max had arrived here in a car with plates registered to him. Lying would just complicate this. 

"Maxwell. Max Missing. Just Max is fine." 

On second thought, maybe Max was smoother at lying than he was at telling the truth. No, wait, this was great. At this rate, the Beacon would decide he was a benign old coot, fill him up with French cookery of all things, and send him on his way without a second thought. This would start to be really funny once Max was twenty or thirty miles away. 

"Nice to meet you, Max." In a moment of truly superhuman grace and subtlety, the Beacon extricated his hand without drawing attention to the fact that Max was so checked out that he'd forgotten to let go of it, and strolled over to the refrigerator. "Would you eat a salad, if I made one?" 

"That's contingent on additional information about the salad," Max said, and the Beacon laughed again. 

Or whatever his name was. Joseph. That was almost intolerably strange -- and if Max had been trying to keep this from getting personal, he had thoroughly and entirely failed. He hadn't even looked at the addresses of the other retired Wardens in the file where he'd found the Beacon's, because the last thing he wanted was to manufacture encounters with Wardens who had already graciously removed themselves from the board. Babbage had often recorded the Wardens referring to each other by their civilian names, which Max had just ignored while he sorted through the corpus. None of his business. 

So Max had turned around and stumbled straight into what seemed to be the actual retirement home of the Blue Beacon, who was apparently named _Joe_. 

"Goat cheese?" the Beacon said, contemplating the interior of his huge steel fridge. His body cut a lean arc out of the refrigerator's glow. He was shorter than Max had realized, maybe five foot eight: during their previous meeting, they'd never been standing on the same surface long enough for comparison. 

"Um," Max said. "How rank?" 

The Beacon must have taken this as assent; he put a log of cheese on the counter. "Very mild. Training wheels goat cheese. Do you keep kosher or -- generally, do you have a dietary restriction I should know about?" 

"Nothing like that," Max said, and watched the Beacon rummage through a produce drawer. 

Maybe just Joseph. There had been some references to a Joseph in Babbage's memories, mostly from older Wardens who would have grown up either with him or under his wing. No Joes. 

Max was standing and staring again, still half-in and half-out of the ajar door. He made a point of closing it behind himself with his free hand, which reminded him of the ridiculous bouquet in the other. "Do you have a vase?" 

"Under the --" the Beacon began, pointing at a cabinet, then caught himself. "Oh, no, no. I can't accept those." 

"What are you going to do, make me drive all the way home with _undelivered flowers_ for my _best buddy_ in the passenger seat?" 

"Jesus." The Beacon had a head of lettuce in one hand and a knife in the other, but tried to conceal his laughter by coughing into the back of his forearm. "That's appalling." 

He made no further attempt to keep Max out of his vases. The cabinet in question contained one glass vase, a porcelain one, and close to a dozen sharply geometric earthenware ones with designs debossed in the clay. It took Max a moment to connect this dot to the kiln outside. 

Pottery? _Souffle_? This guy was _so bored_. 

So he probably was actually retired, if Max's own first six months of retirement were anything to go by. The _N/A_ in Babbage's birthday gift list meant not that the Beacon was dead, but that he'd either gone no-contact or was persona non grata. What could he have done that was so abhorrent that not only would the Wardens not even address the issue with the press, but their robot butler, who they all seemed to treat like some combination of father figure and adored pet, would have nothing to do with him? 

Max took stock while he filled a vase at the sink. He didn't need this information, he just wanted it. He could get out of here clean at pretty much any time, go back to his life, and just ... wonder forever, which would be one hell of a lot better than prison. 

He wasn't going to do that, it just seemed like a good moment to inject some realism into whatever utter dissolution of reason he was experiencing. 

The Beacon was at the kitchen island now, tossing greens in a glass bowl with goat cheese and orange slices and Max didn't know what else. He didn't fill the room with his presence -- he plainly could have if he'd chosen to, but at the moment he was just existing. He seemed to read no threat on Max whatsoever, for which Max could scarcely blame him, and he was doing no aspect of the familiar Blue Beacon, Protector of American Citizenry and Values performance. This really was just Joseph Nayar, whoever that was. Max wondered if Joseph had ever gotten to find out for himself before. 

The vase overflowed in Max's hand. He shut off the water in a hurry. 

Joseph looked up from the salad when Max plunked vase and bouquet down on the island across from him. "Right, let's hear about this dead dog you misplaced somewhere on my property." 

Max had expected neither a joke this mordant, nor to have to provide further details about the pet he'd invented. He let himself have a good laugh about it, partly to buy time. Alison was always talking about her dog, he could probably just use some of her anecdotes whole cloth-- 

The beep of the oven timer saved him. Joseph reached for it, then reversed course and grabbed an oven mitt first. He returned to the kitchen island with a sheet pan containing six ramekins, each with an inch of souffle protruding from the top. The phrase "test batch" had not inspired confidence, but this all looked good and smelled better. It looked like the kind of thing Max was always thinking about eating and never did, because cooking for one was a drag and he was too damn busy for the wait times in the sort of restaurant that served dishes this touchy, even if robbing a few banks had put them well within his budget. He was acutely aware of having spent most of a week eating from the kind of no-name fast food place that existed only in transit stations. 

"Cheese," Joseph said, indicating each ramekin in turn, "same cheese so I don't know why it came out looking so different, prosciutto and asparagus, tomato and caramelized onion, chocolate, Grand Marnier." He opened a drawer with his free hand. "The meringue in the sweet ones is -- I won't bore you with the details, it's different. Which I think is why they're so much more cylindrical. Should fall last, too, so that's dessert. Spoon. Eat." 

"We're eating in here?" 

"Sorry, do you need to be off your feet?" said Joseph. Max gave him a look; he snorted. "Oh, why are we eating standing up in the kitchen like barbarians, you mean. You want a fancy place setting, call ahead. These are going to start falling in five minutes. Eat." 

Max ate. Joseph's souffles tasted like curiously self-saucing omelet-flavored air -- so, exactly as advertised. He laughed when Max said that, and when Max said, "This one tastes amazing but I don't think it succeeds texturally," with an improbably long, wormlike loop of caramelized onion dangling grotesquely from the neck of his spoon. He took ramekins straight out of Max's hands to sample their contents, then returned them to him without a trace of chagrin; eventually Max retaliated by simply eating out of the ramekins Joseph was holding, which Joseph accepted placidly. He coaxed the misbehaving second cheese souffle out of its dish whole with a knife and examined its insides, frowning like a displeased mechanic. Max could see on his face the notes he was taking in his head. 

"So, what do you do?" said Max, before the conversation could turn back to his fictitious pet. 

This should be interesting. Max had said nothing about the Beacon, and nothing that he'd noticed around the house gave the game away. Either they had both been politely not acknowledging the forcefield elephant in the room, or Joseph thought that Max had somehow failed to recognize the most famous face in the world, and was about to lie. 

"Used to be a civil engineer," Joseph said. It came out smooth as glass; Max wouldn't have caught the lie if he hadn't known the truth. 

This was amazing. What did he think, that Max hadn't been in a room with a television at any time in the last thirty years? That a change of venue and a bit of shampoo-commercial head-tossing rendered him unrecognizable? Maybe the polite fiction just went really, really deep for British expats. 

"Used to be?" said Max, trying not to seem too delighted. 

Joseph chased a pine nut around the bottom of the salad bowl with his fork. He had gotten plates, but Joseph had used his for dissection and Max had given up on his own once their interpersonal souffle boundaries had dissolved. For the first time, Max got real caution, hesitation, from Joseph. Not about Max himself; maybe this part of the story just wasn't polished yet. 

"I retired a few months ago," Joseph said. 

"You seem young for it. Fifty?" 

"Fifty-five," Joseph said. He must have gotten this all the time. "I was lucky. Had a lucrative position, got to retire early and build the house I always wanted to build." 

"And by 'build', you mean--" 

"Mostly with my own hands." 

"Was this that tech sector thing where you spend a couple of decades living like a monk and working yourself half to death, then retire in your forties and realize you don't have any social skills or friends and your so-called freedom is like ashes in your mouth?" 

Joseph grimaced. "Well, I didn't think so at the time," he said, "but here I am feeding brunch to random men from the woods. No, I loved my job for its own sake. I wasn't trying to get one over on capitalism." 

He looked up from his food without raising his head. He was always looking up at Max, who had maybe half a foot on him, though he seldom lifted his chin when he did -- just now and then, to joke or to make a point. Instead he looked at Max from beneath his brows, or sidelong, perpetually facing a little away. On the one hand, it gave him an immense, unreachable reserve even when he wasn't lying, at length, right to Max's face; on the other, it lent even inane conversations about food a conspiratorial intimacy. 

It was nothing like how he related to a camera. Max had surely seen dozens of hours of footage of the Beacon addressing the whole world head-on through the lens, and had never once guessed that on his own time he was like this, simultaneously remote and enticing. 

"I just realized one day that I couldn't hack it anymore," Joseph said, "and that I had to get out as quickly as possible. There was no big plan. I think I'd like coffee to go with the sweet ones. Do you drink coffee?" 

"I more or less live on it." 

"Right, hold that thought." 

Joseph's coffee device was a faceted metal object that went on the stove, which Max surmised was going to do something espresso-like with steam pressure. A bit much, but Max probably should have anticipated something like this. When Joseph started frothing milk, Max stuck his hands in his pockets and strolled out of the kitchen. 

It was a pretty little house. Exactly the sort of house Max would have guessed the Blue Beacon would build for himself, if Max had known that the Beacon were the kind of man who built houses -- and had a fucking architecture PhD, if the diploma on the wall that divided the living and dining rooms was not honorary. The Beacon's forcefield constructs relied heavily on geometric shapes: slabs, spheres, platonic solids. Max had assumed they were easy to memorize and made convenient building-blocks for more complex structures, and maybe that was true, but maybe Joseph also just liked them. He'd built a house that looked like an equilateral triangle when viewed from the front or back, then filled it with charming mid century modern furniture. This was the same taste he'd been expressing all along, in a way Max hadn't known how to hear. 

Except he'd forgotten to put in the stairs. 

Max stuck his head back into the dining room, in case he'd missed them somehow. Nope. The second floor was a loft that Max could look straight into from the airy living room, but there was no way to walk or climb to it for a person who couldn't float himself up there on a forcefield, or something in that vein. Superhumans made this kind of mistake all the time, but Joseph didn't strike Max as a man given to thoughtless errors. This was more like the six feet of concrete Max had poured into every entrance of his lair that could admit a human-sized entity: Joseph really did not anticipate guests, at least not ones who would be coming up to bed. 

Well, at least _couldn't hack it anymore_ hadn't meant he had lost his abilities. That would have been -- too weird. Uncomfortable. Flinging himself into sexual exile was also weird, but none of Max's business. 

"How do you take your coffee?" Joseph called from the kitchen. 

"Light, no sugar," Max called back. He took another quick glance around. 

There were a lot of sculptures and tchotchkes Max could probably make smalltalk about if he needed to paper over a conversational gap. Joseph seemed to have relatively little interest in paintings and absolutely none in photos of friends, family, or himself; nothing broke the civilian illusion in an obvious way. Two boxes stood stacked against the railing up in the loft, both of them from services that selected clothing for people who didn't know how to shop for themselves. Funny, but irrelevant. And there was a laptop, which Joseph had left open on the coffee table. 

Max hit the space bar and the screen came to life. He had no laptop-related ambitions beyond that -- he had just hoped that the account name on Joseph's lock screen would be an email address, and in that respect he got exactly what he wanted. The Beacon used Gmail just like every other schlub in this hemisphere. 

The clatter of a spoon against ceramic summoned Max back to the kitchen. Max was just thinking about coffee, and about not giving Joseph a reason to notice that the screen of his laptop was lit; he was not thinking about what Joseph looked like. He did not _care_ what Joseph looked like. But the sight of him hit Max nearly as hard this time as it had that first moment when Joseph emerged onto the deck, as though Max's eye had grown accustomed to the sight of him, only to forget, and now had to reacclimate. _I've never seen such a handsome man in my life._ It made even less sense this time, when Max had been looking at the man in question almost continuously for an hour. 

Joseph met him in the doorway and put a mug in Max's hand. It was an oddly tall cylinder with an over-engineered handle, and Max had the presence of mind to guess that Joseph had made it, too. Of course the coffee was exquisite, and it gave Max something to think about other than how Joseph looked leaning on the kitchen island with his own mug, adjusting the mourning bouquet with a bemused half-smile. 

"Any part of this meal alone would have been the best thing I've eaten this month," Max said without thinking. 

Joseph turned away before Max could see more than a flicker of the way his smile widened. "Kind of you to say. You've been good company." 

"I was going to say earlier, you seem a little at loose ends." 

Joseph thought about this, then ran a hand down his face when he'd come to a decision. "You're retired, right?" 

"About five years, yeah." 

"How the fuck do you ... _do_ it? I had no idea there were so many hours in a week, Max. I finally have time to become well read, and it turns out I hate it." 

Max shrugged. "Do you have much of a social life outside of opportunistically recruiting taste-testers from the wilderness? Have you done anything in the last month that had _stakes_? Real stakes, not oh no, the souffle fell a full minute early." 

"Well--" Joseph sighed. Max had him dead to rights. And now they were in interesting territory, because it would take more lies of greater complexity to maintain his civilian story if he wanted to provide an explanation for why he couldn't just go out and speed date like a normal senior citizen. "I think you're underplaying the stakes of running into you today," he said, meeting Max's gaze obliquely. 

"Bullshit, you were holding all the cards," Max said. He wet his lips and leaned against the counter, warming to his subject. "Do something you can fail at, really fail, or that makes the world measurably different for other people, or both. Get another degree. Design more houses. Sell your pottery at a farmer's market, where you have to look people in the eye while they decide if it's any good. If you're really desperate for a social buffer, come to my parkour class with me." 

At last, Joseph looked alarmed. "Oh, I'm not -- I'm not actually in the market for anything serious right now." 

Max had been ticking items off as he recited them; he froze with one index finger still indicating the opposite pinky. "For what, suggestions?" 

"No, um. Dates." 

"Y-- Wh-- Uh, parkour is not--" 

"Oh." The lines of Joseph's body language reoriented away from Max. He seemed a little stung. "Forget I said anything. I've just been through a major upheaval, so -- I'm sorry if I've been giving the wrong impression, but speaking practically, I really shouldn't--" 

"I wasn't -- I mean, _I'm_ not--" Max gestured urgently at himself. 

Joseph took a sharp breath and stood up very straight. "Have I _profoundly_ misread parts of this conversation?" 

"It's fine." Max made himself relax. "It's just the bowtie." 

"Come again?" 

"The semiotics of bowties must have changed recently, because after I retired I started getting a lot of--" 

"Is that what you think?" 

Max stopped dead. In person, Joseph often looked slightly, secretly amused; now he seemed on the edge of silent hysterics. 

"Max," he said carefully, "your bowtie is not what makes you seem like you're interested in men. What your bowtie does is make you look like the actor they'd cast in a Bill Nye biopic where he's a sexy, take-charge man of action whose shirt keeps getting torn." 

"Th--" Max began. 

" _The reason_ ," Joseph said over him, "that you seem interested in men is that you've been devouring me with your eyes since I found you trespassing in my yard earlier." 

"No I haven't," Max said automatically. 

"Max," Joseph said again. "I count a dozen times that you've spaced out just staring at me." 

This was starting to annoy Max. "It's not like I can help how you look." 

Joseph coughed. Max wasn't sure whether he was covering a laugh this time. "I was expecting you to say you just have resting horny face. Your actual rejoinder is that you aren't attracted to me, I'm just attractive, _objectively_? So if you can't stop looking at me, that's on me, not you and your inclinations?" 

Max hesitated. This didn't hold water even for him. 

He was still hesitating when Joseph took a half-step closer to him. That was all it took, because they had been standing so near to each other all along, without Max quite noticing -- all morning, as they colluded together over breakfast and then coffee. Joseph only had to ease a few more inches into Max's personal space for their bodies to nearly touch. He met Max's gaze with his half-lidded eyes, and took Max by the elbow; Max caught his breath. 

It was entirely unlike Joseph's careful handshake. This time, Max felt _exactly_ how strong Joseph's hand was. It was not a threat. It was an offer. 

"Listen," he said softly. "Max. I wasn't complaining. I wasn't accusing you of anything. It's been very, very nice. I've not felt this hot since I was thirty. I like you a lot." 

Max wet his lips again. This time he caught himself doing it. Oh, fuck. _I've never seen such a handsome man in my life_. This was a fucking disaster, Joseph was standing so close Max could feel his body heat and there seemed to be nowhere else at all in the world to look but his face, and Max's arm was -- on fire, like this one part of his body was finally _actually alive_ \-- 

"I ... should go," Max choked out. Joseph looked down, but not before Max saw that he'd crushed him. 

"Right, of course," he said, letting go of Max's arm. He backed away along the length of the kitchen island until he reached the corner, and let it intercede itself between them. "I'd send you home with dessert, but they're at the end of their lifespan already." 

Shit. Max had been pretty interested in the Grand Marnier one. "You've been--" _Fuck, don't say anything about gracious hospitality--_ "You've been a great host." 

"Thanks, it's been...." Joseph closed his eyes, then winced like a man realizing he was about to make a bad decision. "Can I offer you my number?" 

"I thought you weren't in the market," said Max, like a fucking idiot. 

"There's room for more than one of us to be out of sorts about this," Joseph said. "Lose it right away, if you want. But please, I'll be kicking myself forever if I let you walk out the door without a way to contact me." 

"Okay," Max said weakly. He fished his phone out of his pocket and took a step forward, but Joseph had already grabbed a notepad from the center of the island, and was writing on it with a pencil, like a caveman. 

Max took another step toward him, and another. He'd have to anyway, to accept the note, but once he'd taken the first couple of steps he simply plummeted into Joseph's gravity well again; only a foot of empty air remained between them when he realized what he was doing. Joseph finished scratching out his number and -- the same damn email address Max had gone out of his way to steal earlier, from the looks of it -- and tore the sheet off the pad. Just as he was about to look up, Max reached out and touched the collar of his shirt. 

Joseph's breath caught in an agonizingly relatable way. His body turned toward Max's without hesitation; his eyes went hooded; his head tipped back. But not all the way, even now. If Max were to kiss him, he would have to stoop an extra inch -- or move his hand the short distance up to Joseph's jaw, and turn Joseph's face finally, fully up toward his own. 

He backed off so far Joseph had to pursue him to get close enough again to put his number in Max's hand. 

"I shouldn't have done that," Max said, pinching the bridge of his nose. 

"It's fine," Joseph said, though he didn't sound entirely un-angry. "I get it. It's hard. It's confusing. I went through all this too, but at the time, I hadn't spent my whole life thinking I had myself figured out." He put his hands on his hips and contemplated the floor; for a dizzying moment, Max recognized the Beacon in his body language. Fuck, oh fuck, this was the _Blue fucking Beacon_ and Max had been so incredibly close to kissing him. The urge had not faded -- they were _both_ kind of pissed at Max for not going through with it. "If you need someone to talk to -- well, I'm not exactly an objective third party. What I actually recommend is that you talk to a friend, or look for a support group. But you can also call me. If you want." He pointed at Max's hand, at the sheet of notepaper crumpled in it. "I'd very much like to hear from you again." 

"Thank you," Max said. "You've been--" He considered and rejected several possible ends for that sentence. "Thanks." 

The back door was right there. He let himself out onto the deck before his mouth could get him into any more trouble. He'd have to circle around the house to reach his car, but it was better than staying inside. 

He fled. 

\- 

The drive back into the city felt interminable. Max considered going to his hideout, just to have a few comforting tons of concrete and earth and asphalt between himself and the rest of the world, but opted for his apartment and its superior bed. He kicked off his shoes, threw himself on top of the covers and consigned himself to a food coma for a couple of hours. 

When he woke, his mouth tasted like death but the rest of the situation seemed more manageable than it had before. He hadn't blown his cover. He hadn't lost his freedom. The rest was detail. 

Very ... surprising detail. 

It wasn't even four PM yet. Who the hell had their personality crises in the middle of the day? Max brushed his teeth, put on some pajamas, drew the curtains for what he would admit was no reason other than ambiance, rustled up the laptop he kept at home, and got back into bed. 

Any corner of the internet not devoted to cats or porn was full of pictures of the Beacon. Or maybe it was more of a Venn diagram. Regardless, Max had access to as many photos and video clips of him as he could possibly want. He had no expectation of finding anything that resembled the man he'd had brunch with today, and he was correct in that, but only mostly. Now that Max had spent an hour or two in the company of Joseph Nayar, he could detect him in the Beacon performance. There was one of his sidelong looks, aimed at a talk show host Max supposed Joseph must have liked. There was the cough-laugh when Ironclad made a joke he shouldn't have found funny. There was the downturned face and the hands on the hips, at the podium before the beginning of a press conference about the misconduct of another Warden -- something about smuggling via Mars. Joseph did that one when he was ... deeply upset, but gathering himself. Max closed the tab quickly. 

The Beacon was mostly too relentlessly clean-cut to offer the visual fascination of Joseph Nayar, with his rakish stubble and corkscrewing hair, but he had, to Max's surprise, his moments. Sometimes one of those Joseph mannerisms would come through, or a camera would get him at exactly the right angle when the light was just so. Those were the times when he was interesting to look at. Or rather, when he was attractive. When Max was attracted to him. 

If Max was attracted to a man, it couldn't just be _one_ man, could it? 

This question was so much harder to answer than Max was expecting that it made him downright angry. He knew of at least two websites that would suggest a _font_ based on the user's aesthetic parameters; how was there not already something like this for human beings? Every scrap of energy the internet had that wasn't tied up in phishing scams or whatever TikTok was seemed to be devoted to machine-gunning photos of conventionally attractive people at anyone who cared to look, but the moment he asked it to help him figure out what his _type_ was, it was useless. He ended up composing a list of web services to destroy if this was still annoying him in a week or so. 

Writing it down blunted his ire enough for his critical faculties to re-engage. So many people had noticed some version of what Joseph had noticed today that Max had developed an -- in retrospect, _ridiculous_ \-- theory about what they were picking up on. Which meant, mortifyingly, that there must have been a lot to pick up. Max might not have to look much past his social circle. 

He tried scrolling through the faculty Facebook for the high school where he'd been teaching when he retired, but stopped when he felt his eyelids getting heavy. This was where eroticism went to die. If he'd been attracted to any of his coworkers, he'd have to figure it out some other way. 

Well, Max had other social circles. Alumni of the universities he'd attended, people he'd met through some of the nominally legitimate hobbies he'd picked up in his retirement, neighbors. And ... there was his _other_ other social circle. 

That seemed like his best bet. Max usually didn't do anything crime-related on electronic devices that belonged to Maxwell Missing, law-abiding retiree, but he also wasn't about to go all the way to his lair just so he could use a mainframe roughly as intelligent as a dog to look for pictures of hot men. He hopped through a handful of proxies. That should do it. 

The first thing he did was waste half an hour catching up. Social media for superhuman criminals was not that dissimilar from social media for everyone else; the selfies were just more daring. Some of the ones from the vacation and/or overseas heist the Mercury Man was on probably didn't even have a motivation other than sightseeing. One of them was of a stern, rectilinear Bauhaus building that Joseph would have loved -- that Joseph almost certainly _did_ know and love, and that in fact so clearly represented Joseph's influences that Max -- felt-- 

He didn't know what he felt. He'd blown the laying-the-Beacon-to-rest thing so badly, he could probably only have done a worse job if the Beacon had actually been dead and Max had resurrected him with a kiss. He would worry about it later. 

Hexbeast had snuck into the exclusion zone downtown and taken some selfies at the blast site, surrounded by shattered concrete and about a lab and a half worth of physics equipment that must have been brought in after the fact. She looked great. Not in the sense of "preoccupyingly attractive", but she had a severe new haircut that obviously delighted her, and the scribbly neon eyes that burned in the air around her tentacles weren't blowing out the camera the way they usually did. 

Max distributed likes as appropriate and scrolled onward. His feed was full of people he barely knew, many of whom he'd followed for reasons he couldn't recall. Had any of them been because Max just wanted to _look_ at them? 

He stopped scrolling at a post by the Sovereign Seer. Right, this guy. Operated with the Aries Society, on the opposite coast from Max. He posted a lot of videos about how the Deep was a ladder of spiritual enlightenment and the birthright of every superhuman, accessible through simple meditation techniques. Horseshit. Max had watched ... all of them. 

Except this new one. He fullscreened it. 

The Seer understood his own face and how to light it better than most of the people peddling enlightenment on the internet did. That was probably the secret of his success, since it wasn't like he was backing that up with good content. He ... ah, shit. Max _did_ have a type. The Seer seldom confronted the camera directly: he'd film himself in three-quarters view or even as a dramatically-lit profile instead, cutting his eyes sideways to the camera at crucial moments. It was confidential, elusive, overtly theatrical. Also, he had dark eyes and a lot of hair. 

Max looked at the replies to that video, expecting mostly variations on _This man is enthralling to watch but he's full of piping-hot shit_ , but this proved to be one of the other arenas in which the internet was determined to disappoint him. He closed the tab, vengefully. 

And then closed his laptop altogether, because that was probably as far as this needed to go. Max could be sure now that what had happened at Joseph's house had not been a fluke, and he could probably refrain from making a fool of himself the next time he ran into a man he liked the looks of. That was all the practical application he saw for this knowledge. He'd probably never be in a room with the Sovereign Seer, and if he ever was, he would most likely not be able to prevent himself from starting an argument, which _he would fucking win_. Joseph was even farther out of the question, for a hundred reasons. There must have been others, but Max had bigger goals than dating. He'd sort of figured his sexual existence was over when things had cooled off with Valerie, anyway, which had been almost immediately after they married. It had never bothered him. Even porn didn't really do it for him. 

Because _he'd never looked at porn with two men in it._ Damn it. Max opened his laptop again. 

The difference was so potent that Max almost ended up closing his laptop a second time. He could feel himself blushing. Maxwell Missing did not _blush_. And he had an erection, almost immediately. Those had been kind of rare for most of his adult life. 

He ignored it and just browsed for a while, refining his search terms to circumnavigate the pitfalls that quickly presented themselves -- men so young that the teacher in Max read them as students, men in Wardens costumes. Even reasonably-dressed men of a sensible age in free online porn clips mostly did not excite him in and of themselves, it was just ... what they were doing together, _that_ they were doing it together. There was more fucking than a person could watch in a lifetime, but Max also spent twenty minutes on a clip of two men kissing, backing up to the beginning each time they progressed to undressing each other. 

That could have been Max, earlier. That _should_ have been Max. Damn it, he should have kissed Joseph. 

And Joseph would have let him. More than _let._ Max thought it might have shaken Joseph's expectations nearly as badly as it had his own, too, though at least the phenomenon hadn't been completely unfamiliar for Joseph. It was not the first time someone had hit on Max since he'd stopped wearing his wedding ring; he knew this, because it was also not the first time someone had found it necessary to tell him as much outright. But he had mentally filed those encounters as unfortunate social mixups. For reasons that seemed obvious in retrospect, he'd failed to ever think of flirting as an activity with a _goal_. He'd never thought of it in terms of a beautiful and compelling man leaning into him, and touching him, and making it breathtakingly clear that all of his athleticism was at Max's disposal, if Max was interested. He'd never thought about it in terms of someone wanting to fuck him. 

If Max didn't do something about this erection soon, the matter was going to resolve itself, taking what remained of his dignity with it. 

He took it as slowly as he could, which was not very. He tried to be quiet and wasn't great at that either. He touched himself in some ways he'd recently watched unfamiliar men touch unfamiliar men, and some ways he had extrapolated from watching them. At a critical moment he thought about what his own hand would look like tilting Joseph Nayar's face up toward his own, and he had an orgasm like he hadn't believed existed, a thundercrack of pleasure that felt like it should have blown out the windows. 

When he woke again, it was almost eight. He hauled himself to the bathroom and cleaned up, then went back to his bed and sat on the edge. He stared out the window for a long time, at the visible sliver of the evening sky. Out beyond a scrap of cloud cover, the Deep coruscated with things he was determined to understand, or become, or both. 

Valerie had made a move in Words With Friends while he was asleep, and she must have had her phone in her hand still, because she responded immediately when Max made a move himself. They finished their game rapidly and were halfway into the next when Max texted her. 

_Are you sexually fulfilled at the moment?_

She replied, after a long pause: _Is this an extremely clinical booty call and/or related to a pyramid scheme_

Max: _Neither. Just curious._

Valerie: _If you were going to booty call me at this point I do think it would look something like this_

Valerie: _Whereas Max Missing Joins an MLM would possibly be the worst thing in the universe_

Valerie: _I would have to leave the planet_

Max: _Are you going to answer the question?_

Valerie: _I do all right_

Max: _About what frequency of sexual activity does that entail?_

His phone rang. Shit. 

"What's this about, Max?" said Valerie. 

Max sighed, and weighed his options; she waited. "It occurred to me recently that I might not have been a great husband, and that I contributed to our divorce in some ways that I didn't really grasp, at the time." 

It was her turn to think. They'd been bad at doing some things together, but not this. "Yes and no," Valerie said at last. "Not to steal your thunder, but when we got married, I had my own reasons for liking the idea of a smart man who never forgot I was smart too, and who never tried to initiate sex with me." 

Max rubbed his forehead. " _Never_?" 

"I don't think so. It was always me. It was perfect. I felt really safe with you." 

This conversation was not going the way Max had expected. "What's the yes part?" 

Valerie sighed, then groaned, then sighed again. "Well, eventually I didn't have some of those reasons anymore. But you just weren't very interested, so I decided I was going to pin all of my hopes on retirement. We were going to have our second honeymoon, except this time we weren't going to have jobs or school or student loans, and we were just going to travel and drink fancy drinks and fuck _all the time_...." 

A surprised laugh escaped Max. 

"I don't know if you got better-looking as you aged or if I just fell in love with you again or what," Valerie went on, "but at some point you really started to make my head spin. You would be grading tests or something at the kitchen table, and you'd do that thing where you undid your bowtie and let it hang, and I'd just be losing. My. Mind. The tie thing especially, I can't explain why. I just wanted you to _grab_ me. But you were totally oblivious, so when we retired I knew -- you know, 'knew' -- I had to make you fall in love with me again, too. Which was when you, _very_ clearly, thought that I had gone completely insane." 

"I wouldn't say that, exactly," Max said. 

"Oh?" 

"I thought you always had been, and I hadn't noticed because we were both too busy working to be insane," Max said, and listened to Valerie crack up for a while. "I thought I just hadn't known you," he said, and she quieted. "I thought what I had interpreted as us being very happy together was us not seeing enough of each other to be unhappy. I...." He was silent again, but this time she was silent with him. "I was sorry we had lost ... whatever we...." 

"Me too, Maxie," she said softly, then cleared her throat. "Anyway, what brought this on?" 

Max debated whether to tell her, and what to tell her, for so long that he started to worry she'd think the connection had dropped. "I ran into a colleague unexpectedly," he said at last. 

"And?" 

"He had changed his hair." 

"And--? Oh. Oh! Oh my God. Jesus fucking God in Heaven holy shit, Max! Why didn't you ever say anything?" 

"I've known I'm gay for --" Max glanced at the screen of his phone -- "less than ten hours, Valerie. That's the first time I've said it out loud." 

" _Holy shit_ ," she said again. "Wow." They both paused a long time. "So who's this guy?" 

"We met once before at a work thing. He's not on the table. He was just the right shock to the system at the right time." 

"Aw," Valerie said. "Well, keep me posted." 

"Like you've been keeping me posted about your 'sexual fulfillment'?" 

"That's different. Also, you can't quote things _you said_ back to me in a skeptical voice like they were my dumb idea. You discovered a whole new side of yourself! I'm just dating some ... guys." 

"Mm-hmm. So who are these _guys_?" 

"I can see it was a mistake to give you this phone number." 

"What are your boyfriends' names and, on a scale of one to ten, how intimidating do you think they would find me?" 

"I'm hanging up! Don't try to contact me again!" 

Valerie cut the call. Max flopped back on the bed and had a good chuckle, then had another one when his phone notified him that she'd made her next move in Words With Friends. 

She had phrased it like the back cover copy of a coming-of-age novel, but Valerie hadn't been wrong about the magnitude of this discovery. Max had thought, when he learned that he made for an adroit and remorseless criminal, that that would be the last deep revelation about himself. And yet here was another one, and it was the kind of thing that kids seemed to figure out about themselves around puberty these days. 

What next? What else had he been missing? What other parts of himself still lay dormant, but ready to leap to vivid, demanding life when the slightest stimulus woke them? 

In a way, this still changed nothing. Max only had a few good decades left on the clock, if he was lucky -- and that would entirely cease to matter the moment he shed his body to become a higher-dimensional being. That remained the primary goal. Once he had accomplished it, he could be as remorseless and as gay as he wanted, in four dimensions plus time, forever. All the hidden parts of him could take as much time as they wanted to reveal themselves. And there must be, uh, _men_ in the Deep, or something approximating men. Maybe he'd meet a nice wave and/or particle. 

Because that was how it had worked out with his criminal career, right? He'd just waited, and the bank robberies had come to him. 

Fuck. 

Max lunged out of bed. The jacket he'd worn this morning lay draped over a chair, with the scrap of paper Joseph had written his number on still in the pocket. 

He almost didn't go through with it. He almost never dialed; he almost hung up before Joseph could pick up the phone. Fortunately for Max, Joseph was a second ring kind of man. 

"Nayar speaking," he said, and some vestige of good sense almost stopped Max a third time. The pause ran too long, until Joseph added a brusque, "Hello?" 

"I should have kissed you," Max said, which was not what he had been planning to say. Actually, having any sort of plan for this conversation whatsoever might have been a good idea. This was not how he had approached his first heist. 

"Max Missing. This is a surprise." Joseph's voice softened a fraction. "I don't disagree." 

"Are you free sometime?" 

"Did you seriously peel out of my driveway with your dessert uneaten, in the midst of the latest-in-life sexuality crisis I've ever seen, only to call me back half a day later and ask for a second date without so much as a 'hello'?" 

"Hello," Max said, and Joseph laughed. He sounded like he was doing it against his better judgment. "It's recently come to my attention that I'm gay. I can't stop thinking about you. I ... regret how our conversation ended." 

Joseph was silent a moment, then let his breath out long and slow. Not quite a sigh. "Want to get a drink at the Watchtower in an hour and a half? My treat." 

Max knew it: an open-air rooftop bar and restaurant downtown. Joseph had probably gotten a look at Max's car and judged it out of his price range, and he would have been right if not for Max's little sideline in grand larceny. 

If he planned his approach path carefully, Joseph could probably get in "the back way" by just dropping onto the rooftop from the air, and not risk being recognized by the army of people he'd have to pass in the course of getting into the building and being seated. It was a week night; he'd probably be able to nab a booth without anyone noticing anything out of the ordinary. This might be worth it just to see how this maneuver would go off, even if, somehow, seeing Joseph again weren't its own reward. 

Still, a public meeting was not the choice Max would have expected Joseph to make. "I don't mean to drag you out at this hour. I could drive back to your place--" 

"I think we both know better than to pretend we're just going to innocently chat and share a drink if you show up at my house again tonight, Max," Joseph said. "I've had all day to think about you, too." 

The breath left Max. He clutched at his own hair with his free hand. As much as he'd thought about Joseph today, it hadn't been like this, suffering the same agonies as Max _at the same time_ , separately, together. 

Into the pause, Joseph said, "Are you going to need more than an hour and a half?" 

There may have been a hysterical edge to Max's laugh. "No, I'm fine. It's a short drive." 

Joseph inhaled through his teeth. If Max hadn't been planning to jerk off in the shower already, he sure as hell was now. "It's a date, then," Joseph said. His voice was a little breathless, and so incredibly warm. "When you're done having the wank I very much suspect you intend to have before you see me, maybe you also can think about how you're going to break it to me that you're Doctor Nowhere." 

He disconnected the call. 

Oh, _fuck_. 


End file.
